Children don't laugh just to be polite, no matter who is on stage, but Strong had the kids, and the adults they had allowed to come with them and join in the fun, cackling out loud in a packed Guildhall in Bath.

Admittedly, teachers were sometimes his target - a subject likely to go down with all but the biggest swots - but then as an ex-schoolmaster Strong is entitled to have a bit of fun at a profession he clearly respects. Don't go past a staffroom, he told the audience, "all you will hear is the sound of champagne corks popping. I know. I was a teacher. Champagne and kettle chips that's what they are having behind that door."

His hour-long show was all marvellously expressive. Just a great writer entertaining an audience of all ages with tales, impressions, anecdotes and extracts read aloud from his books.

The 62-year-old Londoner spoke warmly of Miss Cox, the only "young and beautiful" teacher in a school full of 150-billion-year-old teachers - "all from different dinosaur families". He brought to life, with sound effects and facial grimaces, the Tyrannosaurus Rex of a teacher, Mrs Chappell, who had replaced Mis Cox. "She had steel, pointy fangs that dribbled poison." The children roared with laughter and the adults nodded. Who hasn't been taught by an old dinosaur at some stage?

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He told the audience about how he writes in a shed at the bottom of his garden, where he is kept company by his black and white cat Jeeves, who jumps up on to the desk and puts his paw down on the computer keyboard. "He just hits repeat on the same letter so his stories are full of twaddle, to be honest," said Strong.

Strong's anecdotes are charming. In one of his stories, My Brother's Famous Bottom Goes Camping, a girl called Martha has a doll called Cecily Sprout, which is made of a freakish carrot she finds which looks like it has two legs. She dresses it like a doll and plays with it until, heartbreakingly, it is lost.

Strong told the audience that he was sent a parcel recently that raised his hopes. He said: "I thought it was a chocolate bar so I was quite excited but it wasn't at all. It was a carrot which had grown two legs. It had been sent by a girl called Ciara, who included a note saying 'We found Cecily. She was hiding in a bag of Sainsbury's basic carrots."

As with most children's talks, some of the best moments came with the questions from the audience. One asked Strong about falling out of a window as a child. "I fell on my head and broke my arm - and I have never done it again," he joked.

He was also asked about his previous career putting jam into donuts. "I only did it for one week. There were just two of us and one Friday we had to put jam into 6,000 donuts. I only lasted a week and I couldn't eat them for 20 years," Strong said.

Despite all the wonderful tales and humour, Strong had a telling message for people of any age. Miss Cox had helped the author realise, as a boy, that he loved writing stories. "And I knew that you were utterly free to think what you want inside your head," he said.